Behind the News in Singapore
the modern Chinese
people at their best.
The Straits-born
Chinese girl looks to
London or New York
for the style of her
haircut or afternoon
frock-and not back to
China.
She plays tennis or
basketball, rides her
bike, can walk with
easy grace in high
heeled shoes, and in a
ballroom knows the
steps when the orches
tra starts a popular
dance number.
Of dance halls Singa
pore has the Orient's
gaudiest. As in Manila
and Shanghai, here,
too, you meet the taxi
dancer.
She's a
strange, moody social
product of the chang
ing East.
Among Singapore's
many noisy night spots
is the "Happy World,"
a vast Coney Island, its
noisy, glittering streets
lined with every catch
penny device from
shooting at clay tigers
to dancing on a raised
platform, Malay style,
with Malay girls (page
92). In this dance one
"Could I Wear
never touches one's
Singapore sisters in sl
partner; toward the
styles in a beauty parl
end of the long, ex-
about their looks and
hausting dance both shoes of the slim girl i
face each other at close
quarters and jump up and down as fast as
possible-but get nowhere.
Chinese families sit about drinking copious
draughts of fruit juice and eating sliced papaya
and nuts.
Theaters of all kinds roar with drums and
shouts, Hindu, Chinese, and Malay (page
103). Big signs read "Sunlight Pills for
Men," "Moonlight Pills for Women."
Strolling British military police keep a
watchful eye on soldiers of the King, espe
cially the pink-cheeked lads newly here from
England.
When I saw such rookies wading about
camp in morning mud and hanging their rain-
Photograph by J. Baylor Roberts
My Hair Curled in That Paris Fashion?"
it-side Shanghai frocks admire latest French hairdressing
or's show window. They spend as much time and talk
dress as do their European cousins. Toeless are the
n white.
soaked bedding out to dry, or sitting naked to
the waist under a palm and fanning their
sweating faces with a sun helmet, I wondered
what their impressions were of Singapore and
its climate, so different from England's!
Winter Never Comes
Nobody here says "last winter" or "next
spring."
There are no such seasons. Every
day, the year round, is like New York in a
heat wave; people estivate the year round,
but are healthy.
Hurricanes never blow, but they do have
monsoons that shift twice a year, and "Suma
tras," or local rain squalls. In the Raffles